Phobias
by subversivegrrl
Summary: Five things that scare the crap out of Daryl Dixon. Written for the USS Caryl's 1st Word Prompt Fanfiction/Fanart Challenge, prompt "fear."


1. Spiders

He blames that one on Merle, who always looked for opportunities to torture him by throwing one on him, or sticking one in his bed, or making him run face-first into a big ol' web while they were out walking in the woods. It creeped him out to go down in the dank basement of their house, because it was always full of cobwebs and those fucking eight-legged crawlers skittering around in every corner. Any time something was needed from down there, Merle would make him do it, and sometimes he'd turn the light off when Daryl was halfway down the stairs, and bar the door so he couldn't get out. The first couple of times it happened, Daryl used to throw himself at the door and cry for Merle to let him out, but he learned pretty quick that whining about it was the surest way to make Merle just walk away and leave him in the dark. So he huddled on the stairs, with his arms up over his head to keep the spiders off his face, and waited for Merle to come back and let him out. Never out of pity or remorse, but usually because their daddy was yelling for Daryl to do something and Merle didn't want to catch hell for it.

2. Flying monkeys.

He blames Merle for that, too. The first time - the only time - he saw _The Wizard of Oz_ on television, those fuckers freaked him out so bad, he thinks he even peed himself a little (he was four or five, shoulda been old enough to hold it, but Jesus Christ, that scene where the girl gets dragged away and then they find the scarecrow with his guts falling out? that was enough to traumatize him for life.) Merle waited until Daryl went to bed and then climbed up on the tin roof above his room and started scratching at it with a piece of branch or something, making it sound like monkey claws. He woke up screaming that they were coming to get him, and that got his old man wound up; his momma stepped in and got herself a split lip and a bloody nose for her trouble. Merle snuck back inside and made like he'd been there the whole time, but Daryl got a pretty good idea there wasn't anything out on the roof any scarier than what was inside. Still, he got gooseflesh any time anyone even said the words "flying monkey" around him. He just couldn't help it.

3. Birthday parties.

That was another thing that only took one exposure to scar him forever. His momma had taken up going to church, as she did from time to time, and she'd become friends with a woman who turned out to be the mother of one of the girls in Daryl's grade at school. So of course when the girl had a birthday party her mother decided Daryl should be invited, and _his_ momma promised he'd be there. He didn't get any say in the matter. He was nine, and still convinced girls were an alien species. The gift he took for his classmate was something his momma had picked out, some shitty little necklace in a box, and his neck and face were bright red from having been scrubbed nearly raw that morning. His hair was slicked down, and he had on his cleanest pair of jeans, and his sneakers had new laces. The moment he crossed the threshold he knew he had no place there. Little knots of girls in frilly pastel dresses and boys in chinos and short sleeved button-down shirts, some of them even wearing ties, for christ's sake - he felt every eye on him, and a ripple of laughter started off to one side and followed him through the room, like bad news. By the time he finally found the birthday girl herself and handed her his present, she was looking at him like he was a piece of rotted lettuce stuck to her shoe. He went out the door and just kept running until he hit the creek that bordered the woods. It was a shame, too - he didn't even get a piece of that store-bought birthday cake, with those big frosting roses.

4. Being trapped.

He suspects it might be the one thing in his life that kept him focused enough to stay out of trouble, at least jailtime-level trouble, so maybe he should be grateful for it, but it's still the worst thing he can think of, most of the time - to be shut up someplace with no hope of getting out. Not claustrophobia, exactly - he could wiggle through some narrow little cave like it was the biggest, widest canyon in the world, no problem, because no one was forcing him to stay. It was more the feeling of all his options being taken away that gave him the shakes. That was the hardest part of adjusting to the prison, for him, all the narrow hallways and bars and steel doors, everything feeling like it was just waiting for him to step through so it could slam behind him and never let him out. The perch was as far as he could go for a while, but the trade-off there was having no fuckin' privacy, that and a wicked draft when a door opened anywhere in the place. After a while he decided that three concrete walls and a metal grid were something he could deal with, just a state of mind, really, although he made sure he wired the door open against the adjoining bars so somebody didn't accidentally lock him in.

5. Her.

In his world Before, there were pretty much two different kinds of women. There was the flashy kind you hooked up with for a night or a drunken weekend, who sometimes you didn't even get to know by name, and they didn't seem to want anything more from you than what you already expected to be giving - some drinks, a quick fuck on the couch or in the back of the pickup, just to scratch an itch. Sometimes Merle kept one of that sort around for a couple of weeks, but it always ended up with screeching and things thrown and usually Merle surly for a couple of days with the marks of the woman's nails somewhere on his skin. Daryl couldn't see how any of them had such an attraction as to make the later parts worthwhile, so he'd left that sort of drama to his brother.

Then there were the women who endured, the ones who married young and fresh and hopeful, until their dreams crashed on the rocks of too many mouths to feed, too little stability, and usually too much drink. His momma had been one of those, if you had believed the old photographs, and he'd known a fair number of others through his life, women who grew thin and ragged before his eyes, just going through the motions of living because making early plans for death was a sin.

Carol Peletier is a different breed entirely, and she sets off every alarm in him. She should have been a woman like his momma, who had started out blue-eyed and believing, and learned all too quickly that her handsome groom had no idea how to let her partner with him in building a life together, preferring instead to dictate her every move and enforce the rules with his fists. Momma had ridden the polite society train of lies to her grave when she burned down the house around her. But Carol rose from the ashes of her old world, pulping her dead husband's skull with a pickaxe and walking away, straight-backed, to start over.

Even when she lost the last thing that had defined her, the daughter to her mother, she had somehow gone deep within and found something more, dragged it out into the light and built herself a new Carol on top of it, one as tough as old leather but somehow still flexible and warm and giving.

She wants things from him that no one ever expected before, insists that he take a place she says he's earned, accept a measure of respect and even love that she swears he's entitled to. He isn't even sure he knows what most of those words mean, when weighed against the stories he'd always been told about himself. But somehow _stupid, ugly, worthless, unloved_ have lost ground to _honor, loyalty, family,_ and he's started to believe it might be possible for someone to value him for more than just his ability to put meat on the table.

She stirs other things in him as well, things that can bring him up from a sound sleep, breathless and sweating. He doesn't know how to be with her, and it scares him half to death that he could fuck it up beyond repair from sheer cluelessness. He can't treat her like a night's convenience, no matter how much his body might urge him the opposite direction. Sometimes he can scarcely hold himself back from grabbing her and bending her over his bunk, burying himself balls-deep in her until she howls his name. Other times his impulses run more to falling on his knees and pressing his face into her belly, letting her shelter him from the night's terrors. He knows that his hands might be the ones to protect her from danger, but that of the two of them, she's the stronger. How on earth is he supposed to be with a woman like that, who might yet destroy him with a cold word?

A long time ago he heard something about how the things that didn't kill you made you stronger, and he guesses that's right, where Carol is concerned. She lived, and at every turn came back stronger. She lives, and at every turn makes _him_ stronger. He doesn't understand how that's supposed to work, to take strength from someone else, give over a part of himself to another person's care and trust them not to smash it into a thousand pieces, but he suspects now he should learn. He'll let himself feel the fear, learn to live with it, if he can just have another moment of her blue eyes shining at him, holding him safe. Maybe she could even help him learn how.


End file.
